by Jules Witcover

When one of our two major political parties does not hold the White House and has no clearly identifiable prospective presidential nominee for the next election, it often falls to that party's national chairman to become its temporary leader and spokesman.

Such is the circumstance these days in the Republican Party, with Democrat Barack Obama in the Oval Office and the job of 2012 GOP standard-bearer up for grabs among a field of retreads and wannabes of little notoriety or distinction.

Thus it is the Republicans' great misfortune, not to say embarrassment, that the national chairman is Michael Steele, the flashy but abysmally misinformed former lieutenant governor of Maryland, the first African-American to be the titular head of the party of Lincoln.

If his election to the post was to be an inducement for black voters to stampede to the party, it has been a distinct failure -- and ill timed to boot, with the first African-American, a Democrat, in the White House. The GOP continues to be a nearly all-white party, as its Congressional delegation conspicuously shows and as just about any Republican state convention will testify.

More pertinent than Steele's skin coloration is his runaway mouth, which has really got him in trouble within his own party this time, with his preposterous comments on the origins and paternity of the American military involvement in Afghanistan. At a Connecticut fund-raiser last week, Steele was caught on tape making this astonishing claim: "This was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States has actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in."

In one fell swoop, Steele denied to former President George W. Bush one of the few legitimate claims for foreign-policy leadership of his eight years in the Oval Office -- the invasion of Afghanistan in retaliation for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on American soil. The purpose of the invasion, which seems to have momentarily escaped Steele, was to hunt down and capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida cult members who had planned and carried out the foul deed. Never mind that the objective has been unaccomplished to this day; that was the imperative response for the American president.

Digging himself deeper, Steele said Obama, "Well, if he's such a student of history, has he not understood that that's the one thing you don't do is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? ... Because everyone has tried for a thousand years of history has failed."

It didn't take long for other Republicans to come down on him, eventually including such Senate luminaries as the party's 2008 presidential nominee John McCain and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. By then Steele was in retreat on the war: "We must also remember that after the tragedy of 9/11, it is also a necessary one."

Beyond demonstrating Steele's short memory or his capacity for twisting history to his partisan purposes, the chairman's faux pas was a reminder of the critical strategic pivot that Bush made in then invading Iraq under false premises. It was a tragic detour from the justifiable basis for going into Afghanistan in the first place.

In the general scheme of things, what the national chairman of either party says seldom matters much, but such comments do carry some weight when nobody else is officially speaking for the party. For the GOP, this is particularly troublesome when its leadership in Congress is known primarily for its obstructionism of Obama's agenda, earning it the unhelpful label of the Party of No.

The absence of an opposition party agenda -- one is said to be in the making through polling the Republican grass-roots, but there is nothing to show the voters yet -- doesn't give Steele any political cover from his inane misreading of the recent history of the American engagement in the Middle East.

Certainly Steele knows better than to call Afghanistan a war "of Obama's choosing." It's just that he seems to let his mouth run ahead of his brain, a chancy proposition for the party chairman by default, with no other official spokesman around. He should jump before he has to be pushed overboard.

 

Available at Amazon.com:

The Feminine Mystique

The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

 

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The Fiasco of Michael Steele | Politics

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